This checks XML structure and the sitemap protocol rules in your browser. Nothing you paste is uploaded anywhere.
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An XML sitemap validator parses the sitemap file you paste in and checks it against the rules search engines expect: well formed XML, the correct root element, and a valid absolute URL in every entry. A sitemap with a silent error can quietly stop search engines from trusting any of the URLs it lists, so catching the mistake before you submit it saves real crawl time.
The tool runs several layers of checks in order. First it parses your input as XML, so a stray unclosed tag or bad character is caught immediately with the parser's own error message. Second it confirms the root element is either urlset for a normal sitemap or sitemapindex for a sitemap index file, since anything else is not a valid sitemap at all. Third, for a urlset, it walks every url entry and checks for a loc tag, confirms the loc is an absolute URL starting with http or https, flags duplicate URLs, and warns if the file is approaching the 50,000 URL per file limit.
A urlset file lists individual pages directly, one loc per url entry, and is what most small to mid sized sites use. A sitemapindex file does not list pages at all: it lists other sitemap files, each with its own loc, which is how larger sites split their full URL list once a single file would exceed the size or count limit. Getting the root element right matters because search engines read the two formats differently, and a urlset validator run against a sitemapindex, or the reverse, will flag it as invalid immediately.
Relative or malformed URLs are the most common failure, since a loc value must be a complete absolute URL rather than a path fragment. Duplicate URLs usually creep in when a sitemap is generated from more than one source and merged without deduplication. Stale entries, URLs that used to exist but have since been deleted or redirected, do not break the file but do waste crawl attention on pages that no longer matter. Cleaning these issues up across a large site, and keeping the sitemap in sync as pages change, is exactly the kind of ongoing technical hygiene technical SEO work covers.
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